The UK college owned by FTSE 100 company Pearson Llc is aiming to be a “boutique university” that is limited in size, with plans to help the wider company implement its “strategic direction” in education rather than compete directly with universities. Roxanne Stockwell, principal of Pearson College London, spoke to Times Higher Education after the institution moved in the autumn to a new base in company offices in Holborn, central London, where it currently hosts about 440 students of business management as also of animation, video games and visual effects under its Escape Studios acquisition.

Stockwell says that the college’s top objective is “around applying for degree-awarding powers and getting a university title”, with the hope that it could apply for the former in 2017 under existing rules. She says that the aim is to build “what I call a boutique university” with the ultimate goal of reaching 2,000 students.

Pearson, which bills itself as “the world’s leading learning company”, has attracted much interest since launching its college in 2012, given that the size of its owner seemed to offer scope for a major presence in UK higher education. “At the moment, we don’t have plans to run to the hundreds of thousands (of students) — I know that everyone always thinks that we do,” says Stockwell.

But she says that Pearson College London, which still has student numbers capped by the government like all private providers without degree powers, “isn’t about really trying to compete very directly” with universities “and create a UK version of the University of Phoenix (the US for-profit giant) or something like that. It’s more about — if you think about the strategic direction of Pearson moving more and more into education — that we should be able to walk the walk as well as talk the talk.”

Stockwell says higher education is “an important part of Pearson’s overall strategy”. “Further down the track, there could be other ways of creating revenue opportunities, in particular around working with employers and being able to validate and accredit (education and training) activity that happens within employers.”

She also cites Pearson College’s work in starting to offer some modules online. “In Pearson itself (the wider company), what we’re really doing is helping lots of other universities go online. Five years down the track, management may have a different strategy and say we’d really like to do something significant in India, or whatever. And obviously if we’ve got our own UK-based university that could potentially be part of that.”

Stockwell backs the government’s plans to make it easier for new private providers in England to acquire degree-awarding powers, calling the growth in the number of private institutions with the powers so far “pathetic”. “If you’re going to have innovation and challenge, it has to be possible to enter,” she says.